About a week ago we asked for help developing a mobile app. Quite a few folks wrote to me and offered their services - thanks for those offers and the ideas posted in the forum! We are pleased to have decided to work with Sam Vanderhyden who has great ideas for a Mountain Project app, and quite a bit of experience building apps in general.

We plan to build a pretty simple version first and then release better iterations with more functionality. Version 1 will likely be a simple browsing app that lets you download entire areas (say, Joshua Tree or Boulder) and have access to all that content offline.

We appreciate the offers to pay a couple bucks for the app, and certainly a straight donation is a nice gesture. We want MP to be THE climbing web resource, and do that, it needs to be free.

We'd rather you support our sponsors (who support us), and in particular the Dirtbag Deals. That mostly stuff you're probably going to buy anyways at some point, we find it on sale, and then we all benefit when you click through our site first.

Oliver has it right. Releasing an API is the single most pivotal thing MP could do. The thing that makes this site so awesome is the crowdsourcing of gathering climbing area info. Why not pay it forward by making this same data available to anyone who wants to consume it? That would be a truly game-changing move. I can't even imagine the incredible things the community would create (and that's kind of the point, right?).

I'm psyched on the idea...but am having some technical issues. I downloaded the app to my iPhone, but when I go to subscribe, it says I need to purchase the app first. But the app is free, and I already have it! Anyone have this problem, or any ideas how to solve it? Thanks